CRITICS of the president are often advised by the government camp to tone down their rhetoric because they are undermining the post of the President of Republic, which should command respect regardless of who’s occupying it.
This is quite a disingenuous argument, implying that the government’s and AKEL’s main concern is the protection of the institution rather than the individual. President Christofias also repeated this warped logic during his televised news conference last month.
In doing so he displayed his double standards. While he wanted to safeguard the institution of the presidency, he had no qualms about undermining the post of the governor of the Central Bank. Christofias’ attack on Athanasios Orphanides was unprecedented – he questioned his right to speak in public about the economy, his professional ethics and his motives. This was a brutal demolition job of a state institution, perpetrated by the Head of State who misleadingly blamed the governor for high bank interest rates and the exposure of Cyprus banks to Greek government bonds.
Nobody could accuse the president of setting the good example with regard to respecting independent state institutions. Perversely, he showed consistency: the attacks on the governor have been a regular tactic of his administration which has not only tried to undermine Orphanides but also to curtail his executive powers. Three years ago, the finance minister and the president’s AKEL henchmen tried to pressurise him into selling the Central Bank’s gold reserves in order to fund the government’s reckless spending sprees. He refused to heed the advice, behaving as a truly independent state official, but was never forgiven.
A year later, the government used its appointees on the board of the Central Bank in an attempt to reduce the governor’s executive powers. They insisted that executive decisions should be taken by the CB board and not exclusively by the governor. They even sought the services of a law firm which advised that the board had executive powers while another law firm, asked by the governor for an opinion, took the opposite view. One of the three directors, doing the government’s dirty work was the CEO of an auditing firm with international business connections, raising an issue of conflict of interest; a peculiar way of safeguarding a state institution by the government.
The objective was blatantly obvious. It wanted to eliminate the independence of the troublesome governor and bring him under the control of government appointees, who would obey presidential directives. Even the fuss about his powers and the request for legal advice was a joke. How can the governor be an independent state official, if he can not take executive decisions on his own? If the CB board, consisting of government appointees, had the authority to take executive decisions, the governor would cease being an independent state official and the CB, effectively, would be run by the finance minister or the president.
This is exactly what Christofias wants. Independent state officials, who act as such and speak their mind, do not sit comfortably with his authoritarian mentality which demands that all officials toe the presidential line, something Orphanides has commendably failed to do. On the contrary, he has consistently urged the government to take the desperately needed measures that would put state finances in order, warning that delaying decisions would be very costly; he has also questioned the anodyne half-measures taken. The downgrades of the economy and rising interest rates that prevent growth have proved him correct.
And this hurts the government which, in retaliation, has embarked on a quite despicable campaign, launched by Christofias himself, to discredit him and rubbish his judgement. Over the last few weeks we were told that Orphanides was responsible for high interest rates and banks’ over-exposure in Greece, that he was a neo-liberal who wanted to abolish wage indexing and, best of all, he wanted to sell the CB gold reserves. AKEL has a long expertise in this type of dirty campaigning against individuals deemed enemies of the party and Christofias, who wants independent state officials to be yes-men.
It is a great pity that rather than heed the sound and intelligent advice of the governor, the president first tried to limit his powers, and, having failed, is now crudely trying to destroy his professional reputation, with AKEL’s help. We doubt he will succeed but we would have expected the president to show a modicum of respect for independent state officials – even if they are not yes-men.
